Obama seeks to help young minority men

When I went to the White House more than a week after President Obama’s announcement “to build ladders of opportunity” for young black and Hispanic males, his close adviser Valerie Jarrett was still pumped up by the idea.

Armed with the promise that 10 foundations will spend $200 million to come up with meaningful solutions to the problems that afflict young minority men — and her boss’ commitment to have the federal government do all it can to support this effort — Jarrett was ebullient in her description of the initiative Obama calls “My Brother’s Keeper.”

“We’re going to work hard to make sure that if you work hard and play by the rules, regardless of your ZIP code, you have the opportunity to reach your dreams in this country,” Jarrett told me.

Using bully pulpit

I always expected that Obama would use the bully pulpit of his presidency to do something about the plight of young minority men — though at times I worried that his approach was more of a trickle-down effort than a targeted one.

But I had good reason to expect more of him. In 2007, during an interview I had with Obama as his first presidential campaign was getting underway, he told me his strategy for taking on the problems of blacks and other minorities. I asked Obama whether as president he could lead a new War on Poverty, given the historic resistance of taxpayers to funding these kinds of problems. The answer he gave me was a telling description of the path he took to get to My Brother’s Keeper.

“You can’t solve the problem of poverty if you’re not speaking to the larger anxieties that working people and middle-class families feel as well,” Obama told me. “That’s how the agenda has to be framed in the context of universal health care for everybody. ... The more we can say we’re going to fight on behalf of all working Americans, and we’re going to (then) do extra stuff for those who need the most help, that’s an argument we can win.”

Minorities lag behind

I don’t know whether he can fix what ails young black and Hispanic men, but I’m damn glad he has launched an aggressive campaign to try to do just that. Young minority men in this country are an endangered species. As this nation surges toward the day when minorities will be a majority of its population, the high school graduation rates of black and Hispanic males are significantly lower than that of white males. The unemployment rate of blacks and Hispanics ages 16 to 19 is substantially higher than that of white teens.

“What we want to do is spotlight what works. We want to take it to scale. We want to look at the key times in the lives of those boys and men when we can step in and really make a difference,” Jarrett told me. With less than three years left in his presidency, Obama is going to have to really hustle to make a dent in the problems these young men face.

Historians almost certainly will point to his national health care plan as the great benchmark of Obama’s presidency. But it will be the success or failure of his efforts to strengthen the generation of black and Hispanic men who will be the core of America’s new majority that might be the greatest impact Obama will have on this nation.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.